


montage in soft sighs

by lapoesieestdanslarue



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Fluff, M/M, romantic poetic prose just because I feel so much for them, shamelessly inspired by movies, we can pretend its okay because I'm a film student right?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 18:05:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17647334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapoesieestdanslarue/pseuds/lapoesieestdanslarue
Summary: “Do you love me?” Steve asks from beside him.Bucky rolls his head over to look at him, lazy. He reaches out, brushing his fingers against Steve’s lips. “You know I do.”





	montage in soft sighs

**Author's Note:**

> This is the weird hybrid child that came from the weekend I watched Destroyer and If Beale Street Could Talk (thanks film school, you failed experiment!) and I just couldn't get their atmospheres and dialogue out of my mind. Thus was born this. Please enjoy, and please see Destroyer!

Soft breaths, tendrils of early morning light catching the dust particles they share the room with. Bucky reaches up, running his finger through their beams, as if he’s trying to catch them.

“Do you love me?” Steve asks from beside him.

Bucky rolls his head over to look at him, lazy. He reaches out, brushing his fingers against Steve’s lips. “You know I do.”

 

★

 

Steve supposes that he was always in love with Bucky, he just never realised it. 

They grew up together, were children together and became men. They played together, learned together, so close at six and seven they even had baths together during sleep overs, when Bucky’s Ma was in the hospital having his sisters or Steve’s mam was pulling another night shift so he was shipped off to Bucky’s. So Steve hardly every recognised that the intensity of his feelings was _love,_ because it had always been with him, just as Bucky had, and he’d never had to discern the two apart. 

But he can remember it, clearly. That moment when it dawned on him that best pals didn’t brush hands like they did, that your best pal shouldn’t send your heart flying into your mouth when he looks at you so and bites his lip. 

It was while they were riding the subway, the D train back to Brooklyn. It’s crowded being peak commuter time, and they’re standing pressed against each other against the door. Steve holds on to the handrail, Bucky being taller has his arm up to the ceiling grips. It was there, looking up at him and his face still a bit dirty from work with his hair slicked back and chewing on a toothpick, that Steve realized Bucky was the most beautiful human he’d ever seen in his life. The joy of that moment, the floating feeling, the way everything just slowed down and there was only Steve, and Bucky, and Bucky’s eyelashes fanning out like a dame’s, his red lips, sharp cheekbones and hard nose. His kind, impossibly soft heart, that felt things four times as much as everyone else. The way he caught Steve, staring, and smiled at him, as if he knew. Steve wouldn’t have been surprised if he did. And even though a second later the realization that he _liked_ Bucky like _that_ , the worry, the sudden God-struck fear of burning in h-e-l-l, the joy still remains his most cherished memory, a beacon of light in his life, a moment he returns to in his darkest hours. Whatever about rosaries and adorations and novenas, the joy of that moment can never, ever be taken away from him. Him, Bucky, on the subway, and a heart filled to the brim with love it could almost burst. 

 

★

 

Steve thinks this is maybe what the apostle Luke spoke of when he talked of love, and God’s love for His people. 

To reach out and _touch,_ to bring Bucky to his knees, it’s a first act of Godhood. 

Bucky makes him weak, but he also makes him _bold._ Like the way that late one night walking home from the pictures, when the subway station was barren, Bucky reached out and took his hand, then and there. He never let it go, not once, taking him all along the backroads so they could walk home in peace and pretend, for a minute, that it was okay and they were safe and free. He didn’t let go, didn’t let his hand fall from Steve’s until they got home and he had to dig the keys out of his pocket. 

Steve felt like he could fly. Really truly, like he could soar. 

 

★

 

At night, they can move with a freedom neither of them could have imagined. Steve knows that Bucky chased about half the skirt in Brooklyn, and also that he kissed Richie Hughs behind the gym that one time. Though he is woefully inexperienced, Steve thinks that it’s kind of the same, for the both of them. It’s never been this special, it’s never been with the other.

“Just remember that I belong to you,” Bucky whispers in his ear, above him, big and strong and safe, like a house. “And that I would never hurt you. And that I love you, Stevie, _baby._ ”

It doesn’t take long for them to learn each other, but that’s what growing up together will do to you, irrevocably bonded in a way neither knows how to name. They melt together, becoming flesh of each other’s flesh. 

 

★

 

Afterwards, always, Bucky lights up. “C’mon,” he cajoles, “‘S good for your asthma.”

It’s there, in the midst of the afterglow and the smoke and the haze, that Bucky is the most himself Steve has seen him since his dad died and he had to become the man of the house. 

“How lucky I am to have you,” one of them whispers, running a thumb over the perfect arch of lips. 

A kiss, a sigh, a vow.

It was in love you were created, and in love is how you’ll die. 

 

★

 

The war wears on Steve, more than he’d imagined. Then again, war was never supposed to be like, something so defies the bounds of the human imagination. War was meant to be about fighting for what was right, and not letting the bullies win. So far it’s more inhumane torture and bureaucracy. 

One night, Bucky pulls him aside while the camp is quiet. “I’m doing this all for you, you know that?”

“Bucky--”

“No, I just. Steve, I need you to promise me that you _know._ Don’t you ever doubt, even for a second, that I love you, you hear me? There has not been a moment alive when I have not been in love with you. Flesh of my flesh, remember? We’re nearly home, Steve. Can’t you feel it? Say it. Say we’re nearly home.”

“We’re nearly home,” Steve mumbles.

“Say I’m going to make it home.”

“I’m going to make it home.”

“I’ll make a home with you Steve, where I can love you and kiss you all I want, and call you my husband right before God.” 

 

★

 

Ninety years later, Steve gets a phone call. 

He’s been waiting. 

“I’m coming home,” Bucky says over the crackle of static. The sound of it makes Steve weak in the knees, to have heard him so alive, so _him._ “I’m coming home to you, soon, but you just have to give me time, okay?”

“Okay,” he answers. And then, before he loses his courage, “Bucky, you’re nearly home.”

There’s a silent heartbeat. 

“I’m nearly home.” Relief crashes over Steve like a wave.

“You’re going to make it home.”

“I’m going to make it home.”

 

★

 

They lie together like they did all those years ago, except now the view outside their window has changed dramatically. 

Bucky sighs, cigarette dangling from his lips while he works out the knots in his long hair with his metal arm. 

He turns to look at Steve, thumbing at the love bite he left over his neck. 

“Do you love me?” It’s coy, teasing. 

Steve turns to him, indulgent. He leans forward, and kisses him. “You know I do.”

**Author's Note:**

> Comments are greatly appreciated, as per :')


End file.
